Hacker News Reader

Comment by barista | Hacker News Reader

Not blaming you. You did what you were paid to do. What I am disappointed at is the fact that Google chose to only open the code that it HAD to do. It did choose the mechanism that made it easier to consume but that is besides the point.

No point arguing here. Not trusting Google to do the right thing these days anyways.

View on HN

I'm curious. Do you also blame Apple and Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter for not doing the right thing when you don't see their full code base on github?

None of these companies you mentioned have a "Don't Be Evil" policy, nor they have a lawyer posting here claiming that they are doing a "public service"

Since Google doesn't share their bread and butter PageRank algorithm, does that make them evil? Also if releasing said algo would cause them to lose massive marketshare, wouldn't that also be evil (to their shareholders and employees)?

I am simply pointing the fact that if you are going to claim yourself as the "good guy" the community will hold you to a higher standard, in reply to the parent comment. No one is expecting Google to do any charity, but Google themselves sell this image of do-good and pro-open source, so why the surprise when the community asks them to walk the talk?

I guess for the HN crowd enough will never be enough. What if they are keeping part of their codebase closed because they want to make money off of it? And if this is so anti good-guy, then if they released it and then the project was cancelled because they weren't able to recoup their costs is this still good-guy? IE: No more development from Google on this cutting edge product could be seen as a net loss for everyone vs. a win for 100% open source demands.

choosing the mechanism that made it easier to consume is not beside the point because google didn't have to do that. we know two things; 1, they had to make the source available, 2, they released the source online. We cannot assume they only did this because they had to, especially when they went above and beyond the requirements. With this logic, anybody that doesn't break the law only does so because of the law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com